1. Field
The present invention relates generally to location awareness of racks and rack components and, more specifically to localizing rack-mounted computing devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computer-equipment racks, such as server racks, are generally used to house and in some cases interconnect collections of computing devices, like servers and associated storage, power supplies, network switches, and the like. In many cases, the computing devices are relatively numerous and arranged in relatively-dense arrays due to the cost of space appropriate to store such computing devices and the desire to reduce latency by having the devices close to one another.
Often, locating an individual computing device among a large number of racks (e.g., tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of racks) can be challenging. Generally, large data centers rely on naming schemes, human keying, network correlation and other similar addressing schemes to track physical location of the computing devices. These and other methods are often impractical and error-prone, which may result in incorrect equipment being serviced, or items needing to be serviced to being instead missed, for example.